Julio Cortez | APFireworks are seen over Olympic Park during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Mark Humphrey | APRussian President Vladimir Putin, second from right, and International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, centre, wave as they stand alongside United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, third from left, during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Ivan Sekretarev | APThe flag of Russia is raised during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Charlie Riedel | APPanagiota Tsakiri of Greece holds her national flag and leads her team into the stadium during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Patrick Semansky | APThe United States team arrives during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Mark Humphrey | APAlexander Zubkov of Russia carries the national flag as he leads the team during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Matt Dunham | APHayley Wickenheiser of Canada carries her country flag as they arrive during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Robert F. Bukaty | APThe Olympic flag is carried during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Julio Cortez | APFireworks are seen over the Olympic Cauldron during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Pavel Golovkin | APFireworks explode over Fisht Olympic Stadium at the end of the opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Pavel Golovkin | APFireworks explode over Olympic Park at the end of the opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoEvgeny Feldman | Associated PressPolice detain gay-rights activists in Red Square in Moscow. Russian discrimination against gays has been strongly criticized by the international community.

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SOCHI, Russia — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking
more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports
instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.

And that’s just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to go.

The world’s premier athletes on ice and snow have more to worry about than geopolitics as they
plunge into the biggest challenges of their lives on the mountain slopes of the Caucasus and in the
wet-paint-fresh arenas on the Black Sea shores.

Superlatives abounded in the ceremony in Fisht Stadium and the mood soared as Tchaikovsky met —
strangely enough — pseudo-lesbian pop duo Tatu and their hit
Not Gonna Get Us. Russian TV presenter Yana Churikova shouted: “Welcome to the center of
the universe!”

Yet no amount of cheering could drown out the real world.

Fears of terrorism, which have dogged these games since Putin won them amid controversy seven
years ago, were stoked during the ceremony itself. A passenger aboard a flight bound for Istanbul
said there was a bomb on board and tried to divert the plane to Sochi. The plane landed safely, and
the man, a Ukrainian, was taken into custody.

The show opened with an embarrassing hiccup, as one of five snowflakes failed to unfurl as
planned into the Olympic rings, forcing organizers to jettison a fireworks display and disrupting
one of the most-symbolic moments in an opening ceremony.

That allowed for an old Soviet tradition of whitewashing problems to resurface. State-run
broadcaster Rossiya 1 substituted a shot from a rehearsal with the rings unfolding successfully
into its live broadcast.

Also not noted in the show: Putin’s repression of dissent and inconsistent security measures at
the Olympics, which will take place just a few hundred miles away from the sites of a long-running
insurgency and routine militant violence.

And more things that got ignored: the poorly paid migrant workers who helped build up the Sochi
site from scratch, the disregard for local residents, the environmental abuse during construction,
the pressure on activists, and the huge amounts of Sochi construction money that disappeared to
corruption.

Some world leaders purposely stayed away, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and dozens of
others were in Sochi for the ceremony. He didn’t mention the very real anger over a Russian law
banning gay “propaganda” aimed at minors that is being used to discriminate against gay people.

But IOC President Thomas Bach won cheers for addressing it yesterday, telling the crowd it’s
possible to hold Olympics “with tolerance and without any form of discrimination for whatever
reason.”

For all the criticism, there was no shortage of pride at the ceremony in what Russia has
achieved with these games, after building up an Olympic Park out of swampland. The head of the
Sochi organizing committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko, captured the mood of many Russians present when he
said, “We’re now at the heart of that dream that became reality.”

“The games in Sochi are our chance to show the whole world the best of what Russia is proud of,”
he said. “Our hospitality, our achievements, our Russia!”

The ceremony presented Putin’s version of today’s Russia: a country with a rich and complex
history emerging confidently from a rocky two decades and now capable of putting on a major
international sports event.

Putin himself was front and center, declaring the games open from his box high above the stadium
floor. Earlier, he looked down as the real stars of the games — about 3,000 athletes, dressed in
winter wear in their national colors to ward off the evening chill and a light dusting of man-made
snow — walked onto a satellite image of Earth projected on the floor of the stadium. The map
shifted so the athletes appeared to emerge from their own country.

As always, Greece — the birthplace of Olympic competition — came first in the parade of nations.
Five new teams, all from warm weather climates, joined the Winter Olympians for the first time.
Togo’s flagbearer looked dumbstruck with wonder, but those veterans from the Cayman Islands had the
style to arrive in shorts.

The smallest teams often earned the biggest cheers from the crowd of 40,000, with an
enthusiastic three-person Venezuelan team winning roars of approval as flagbearer and alpine skier
Antonio Pardo danced and jumped along to the electronic music.

Only neighboring Ukraine, scene of a tense and ongoing standoff between a pro-Russian president
and Western-leaning protesters, could compete with those cheers.

That is, until the Russians arrived.

Walking in last to the thundering
Not Gonna Get Us bass line, which struggled to overcome the ovations from the hometown
crowd, the Russians reveled in all the attention.

The country always places huge significance on the Olympics, carefully watching the medal count.
The Russians’ dismal 15-medal performance in Vancouver four years ago is on the minds of many.

But these games are particularly important, as many Russians are still insecure about their
place in the world after the end of the Cold War and the years since that have been dominated by
the United States and, to an increasing degree, China.

In this opening ceremony, Russia put on display its cultural and scientific history — from
Malevich’s avant-garde paintings to Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace, from Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements to the Soviet space
achievements.

Capping it all off, Russian hockey great Vladislav Tretiak and three-time gold medalist Irina
Rodnina joined hands to light the Olympic cauldron. He’s often called the greatest goaltender of
all time by those who saw him play; she won 10 world pairs figure-skating titles.

That was how it ended. At the top, the show avoided talking about prickly issues, even when the
women in Tatu took the stage. The duo, who put on a lesbian act that is largely seen as an
attention-getting gimmick, held hands during their performance, stopping short of the groping and
kissing of their past performances.